Making a splash: Young entrepreneurs develop bracelet that grabs photos for water park guests

Terry Shaw

4:53 PM, Oct 20, 2013

Action Bracelets, currently offered at Wilderness in the Smokies water park, are waterproof. They send photos taken at the park to the user's cell phone.

Steven Johnson, CEO and president of Action Bracelet, at his desk.

Members of the Action Bracelet team at a recent World Waterpark Association Trade Show in West Palm Beach, Fla. From left, Channing Bailey, Johnathan Halley, Steven Johnson, David Johnson, Matthew Moses and Chris Fortune.

Steven Johnson wasn't thrilled with the job market when he graduated from college, so he started his own company. Now Action Bracelets — which automatically captures water park pictures onto users' cell phones — is about to make a big splash.

The 28-year-old and a few friends got the idea a few years ago while watching people use their phones to take pictures of pictures displayed on monitors at a water park.

"That's when a light went off and we came up with an SOS — a stupid obvious solution," Johnson said. They developed a waterproof bracelet that links cameras at a water park to a guest's cell phone. Guests set their bracelet to their cell phones, and when they pass by a water park camera, a photo is taken and automatically sent to their phone.

The company officially formed early this year. It landed its first customer over the summer: Wilderness at the Smokies, a Sevierville water park.

"We just got back from a trade show in West Palm Beach," Johnson said last week from his office at 719 Dameron Ave. "We're getting calls from two or three parks a day. Right now we're talking to everyone smaller than Disney."

Steve Cruz, Wilderness at the Smokies' general manager, praised the system as an easy and affordable way for guests to share pictures. For $17.99, guests get one of the waterproof bracelets and access to a system that takes unlimited photos from cameras mounted throughout the park for 10 days. Pictures taken of guests wearing the bracelets are immediately texted to the guest's cell phones.

Action Bracelet currently has 12 employees, with what Johnson called six core members, including his brother, David Johnson, Matthew Moses, Jonathan Halley, Ryan Huffman, Chris Fortune and Channing Bailey.

Johnson said the team has one thing in common.

"We're all ambitious and we all want to do more than the typical 9-to-5 job," he said.

While the success seems to have come quickly, Huffman, the main computer programer, said it took a lot of hard work.

"Instead of asking how many hours I work, it might be more realistic to ask how much I sleep," Huffman said. "And it's not much."

Huffman is a nursing student at Carson-Newman College who won't graduate until next year. He got hooked on computers when his parents sent him to programming camp one summer during junior high.

"Just imagine what that did to my social life," he said, laughing. "It pretty much sealed my fate as a nerd."

Bailey, the company's creative director, met Johnson while the two were on spring break in a Hawaii, staying at the apartment of a mutual friend.

"We realized that we had similar visions for our life," Bailey said.

"And we knew that with the economy the way it was, we weren't going to be able to get real jobs that would be worth our time," added Johnson, who graduated from the University of Tennessee in 2011 with a degree in marketing and international business.

"What I love most about the job is that we're helping people save their memories," he said. "That makes it fun."

But, he admitted, he's sometimes stuck in front of his computer all day. He typically works 60 hours a week.

"We've actually only had one day where the whole team grabbed bracelets and went out to Wildnerness at the Smokies," he said.

He's optimistic about the future.

"Two or three months from now we're going to be in a completely different place," he said. "The general consensus in the industry is that there are many bracelets that do many different things."

This could include opening a resort's hotel room or ringing up charges from its gift shop or restaurant.